Apparently people with good credit are penalized at AT&T. Their convenience prepaid plan on the iPhone is only available to people who fail a credit check. If you have good credit, pre-paid is not an option. From AVC this morning:

After about five minutes, the manager got on the line. I repeated my case, asked him to authorize a prepaid plan for my phone. He said he could not do so. That it was AT&T policy to only issue pre-paid plans to people with valid social security numbers who fail a credit check.

Brutal. Time to go ignore my bills for the next 3 months ;)

Seriously though, I now have no where to go! I’m planning on leaving Verizon at the beginning of October in protest over their lawsuit against the FCC. I had Sprint for 4 years, and their customer service made me feel like an untouchable, so I won’t go there. Fred’s AT&T experience has convinced me I shouldn’t go there. All that’s left is T-Mobile, but their network is atrociously bad. I have no options left.

Time to buy a Nokia N800 and load it with Skype. Jumping from wifi island to wifi island around the city has the unbeatable price of “free” and would comparable service quality to T-Mobile ;)

Update: By complete coincidence, I received my Verizon Wireless bill this month a few minutes ago, and it said that I had accepted a one year extension of my contract in exchange for one free month of service. I did nothing of the sort and had to forcefully push my way through customer service in order to get them to reverse the error. I hate the carriers!